Later this week I’ll be at the The Educational Travel Conference (ETC), Jan. 19-22 in Orlando, Florida. ETC is the founding conference for Alumni, Museum, Zoo, Conservation, and Nonprofit Educational Travel. It hosts 450 delegates who are a highly-qualified international group of nonprofit travel planners, suppliers, specialty tour operators and destinations. They assemble to focus on the development, operation and marketing of group educational, experiential and affinity travel worldwide.

I am looking forward joining Kathy Dragon, Doris Gallan and Heather Hardwick Rhodes for several agenda sessions there on Friday Jan. 20:

• Going Past 40: How Today’s Baby Boomers are Traveling and Making their Buying Decisions, 9:30 – 10:50 a.m.
• Boomer Product Development: Go Broader, Go Deeper by Appealing to Core Values of the 40+, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
• Prime Time Travelers: Diving Into The Digital/Social Component Of the Boomer Marketplace,  4:15 – 5:30 p.m

Learn more about The Educational Travel Conference (ETC) here.

For this week’s show, The Business of… Brain Fitness, we have guest Henry Mahncke, CEO of Posit Science, the leader in clinically proven brain fitness software. Their software is scientific brain training designed to improve memory and cognitive skills.

Listen to the show →

Empty nesters can put a lot of pressure on the holiday season. As former “helicopter parents,” we no longer have day-to-day involvement with (or control over) our adult children and many of us are joining the ranks of grandparents. Short of cutting out our tongues, there are many things we can do to ensure a fun, peaceful holiday visit to create memories for the entire family.

Here are some of my tips from current Allstate blog post. How do you keep the lines of communication open?

On stands now is the print edition of Forbes magazine (December 2011, Investment Guide). It features the story Boomers: Reinventing the Next Chapter, by Deborah L. Jacobs. Lori was interviewed for this article about her success in building a business that helps others to understand the needs and wants of the Baby Boomer and Senior consumers, and effectively reach them.

For this week’s show, The Business of…Learning in Later Life, we spoke with Susan Hoffman, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at University of California – Berkeley. We discuss the programs available to continue learning throughout life, and the proliferation of OLLIs (Osher lifelong learning institutes).

Listen to the show

We are pleased to announce that we have been selected as the marketing agency of record by Aging Technology Alliance™ (AgeTek™), a trade group of companies that develop and/or market technology-based products designed for the senior market.

AgeTek represents companies and organizations dedicated to promoting the awareness, benefits and value of products and services for our aging society. Their members’ products and services allow seniors to remain independent and age in place at home, as well as empower many seniors to enjoy a healthy, active lifestyle while securing their mobility. AgeTek is focused on bringing greater awareness to their industry, products, and to its select group of companies that are working together (and independently) to develop better-designed, less expensive and better-tested products for the senior consumer.

Continuum Crew will counsel AgeTek on thought leadership activities and member engagement activities. We will also develop and implement an advertising and media plan, with interactive media services (including the execution of email campaigns and search engine optimization), marketing collateral production, public relations and social media activities.

“As we seek to gain the attention of public policy makers, regulators, lawmakers, advocacy groups, mass media and the general public about the benefits of technology appropriately designed for seniors, we know aligning ourselves with Continuum Crew is the perfect choice,” said Peter Radsliff, Board Chairman, AgeTek. “Led by Lori Bitter, she and her team have a strong presence in this space and an outstanding reputation. They know how to most effectively reach these audiences. We look forward to what this partnership will yield as we grow our organization.”

To read more about this announcement click here.

Lori’s latest blog post for MediaPost Communications Engage Boomer blog, discusses the drumbeat of the ‘Move Beyond Age’ movement has grown louder throughout this year, with conversations ranging from how to “re-tool” senior products for Boomers, to how to appeal to the largest demographic in today’s marketplace. Friends and partners are shining a light on human-centered design and the aging population.

Read Lori’s MediaPost Communications Engage Boomer blog post Move Beyond Age – Let’s Talk Better Design here.

In A Brutal Economy, Boomers Rewrite The Next Chapter

11/16/2011
(This story appears in the Dec. 5, 2011 issue of Forbes.)

So much has changed since our last issue of C2! The one constant is that the economic outlook continues to provoke anxiety. Older adults appear to be faring better in some respects than younger generations, though our studies show they continue to live under a cloud of worry. Many are expressing this as the loss of the American dream for younger generations, particularly their children and grandchildren.

Continuum Crew has experienced positive growth as the mature consumer market continues to be able to spend on a number of products and services for themselves and their extended families. In fact, a new MetLife Report on American Grandparents (July 2011) notes that households led by those aged 55 to 64 increased their non-health related spending by an average of $11,700 over the past ten years, when their household income rose just $1,200. Further, in the same ten-year period 55- to 64-year-olds spent $7.6 billion on baby food, infant equipment and clothing, toys, games, and tricycles – a 71% increase. Household spending for the 25- to 44-year-old households with children present saw a far smaller rate of increase indicating that baby boomer grandparents are helping in all new ways. (Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys).

It has never been more important to listen carefully to consumers to understand what they want from products and services, and how they want to be engaged. Continuum Crew launched Crew Media earlier this year to purchase Eons.com – the only baby boomer social network. Founded in 2006 by Jeff Taylor, also founder of Monster.com, Eons has more than 800,000 members who have started more than 1,700 groups focused on their passions and interests. Learn more about it from community manager Ri Regina on page 13.

Also under the Crew Media banner is our partnership with GRAND – the digital magazine for the grandparenting lifestage. As a first-time grandmother to baby Gabriel McClain, I am proud to be GRAND’s new publisher.

Another initiative we launched this past spring is Move Beyond Age, a coalition of individuals and companies who are committed to making smart design a quality of life issue. We are encouraging companies to design better products and services for older consumers, which in turn create better experiences for every generation. Take a look at Jeffrey DeMure’s article on the Bookend Markets, Bill Yates on GreatCall, and Stephen Winner on the Silverado Story, for examples of companies and thought leaders who understand the importance of designing smart products and services.

Also new to Continuum Crew is The Business of Aging radio show on WeEarth Global Radio Network – WGRN. The show is also available here on our blog and on iTunes. In this issue we share our first show of the season, an interview with Patricia Lippe Davis from AARP Media Sales on her view of the mature consumer marketplace. We are currently in our second season and hope you will join our listenership as we talk about successful strategies for engaging consumers over 40.

With that, I am pleased to present to you our latest issue of 
C2 magazine, Issue 27, Autumn 2011

Available for download here.

Thank you for your continued enthusiasm for our market and our work here at Continuum Crew!

Lori Bitter,
Editor-in-Chief, C2 magazine

The recently released MetLife Report on American Grandparents revealed that 1 in 10 households is headed by a grandparent with at least one grandchild living there. The study reports that part of the reason for this is high rates of unemployment among the children’s parents. Interestingly, in 1980 there were only 28 million Americans living in a household that included two adult generations or a grandparent and at least one other generation. By 2008 the number was 49 million Americans living inter-generationally.

In a recent New York Times story about this trend, Kermit Baker, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard and the chief economist of the American Institute of Architects, said, “Immigrants are a source of growing demand (for intergenerational homes), and their household composition is different in fundamental ways from the domestic-born.”

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